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research article

Encoding of Marginal Utility across Time in the Human Brain

Pine, Alex
•
Seymour, Ben
•
Roiser, Jonathan P.
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2009
The Journal of neuroscience

Marginal utility theory prescribes the relationship between the objective property of the magnitude of rewards and their subjective value. Despite its pervasive influence, however, there is remarkably little direct empirical evidence for such a theory of value, let alone of its neurobiological basis. We show that human preferences in an intertemporal choice task are best described by a model that integrates marginally diminishing utility with temporal discounting. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that activity in the dorsal striatum encodes both the marginal utility of rewards, over and above that which can be described by their magnitude alone, and the discounting associated with increasing time. In addition, our data show that dorsal striatum may be involved in integrating subjective valuation systems inherent to time and magnitude, thereby providing an overall metric of value used to guide choice behavior. Furthermore, during choice, we show that anterior cingulate activity correlates with the degree of difficulty associated with dissonance between value and time. Our data support an integrative architecture for decision making, revealing the neural representation of distinct sub-components of value that may contribute to impulsivity and decisiveness.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1126-09.2009
Web of Science ID

WOS:000268444100017

Author(s)
Pine, Alex
Seymour, Ben
Roiser, Jonathan P.
Bossaerts, Peter  
Friston, Karl J.
Curran, H. Valerie
Dolan, Raymond J.
Date Issued

2009

Published in
The Journal of neuroscience
Volume

29

Start page

9575

End page

9581

Subjects

Anterior Cingulate Cortex

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Decision-Making

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Intertemporal Choice

•

Orbitofrontal Cortex

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Nucleus-Accumbens

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Dopamine Neurons

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Reward Magnitude

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Neural Systems

•

Impulsivity

•

Uncertainty

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SFI-PB  
Available on Infoscience
November 30, 2010
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/59971
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